Instructors

Beth Verano

After earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, Beth decided to teach for just a few years, until she figured out what she wanted to do. She fell in love with teaching, however, earned a Master of Arts in Teaching, and has been an educator since 2007. She spent most of her career in Las Vegas, where she taught science and math courses at both the high school and college levels. In 2018 her family moved to Reno so that her daughter could attend the Davidson Academy. It has been incredible to see her daughter’s transformation and enthusiasm for school, now that she attends the DA.

In 2019 Beth began teaching for Davidson Academy Online. She is beyond grateful to have the opportunity to facilitate a rigorous and intellectually stimulating online experience for profoundly gifted students living all over the country. After years of positive experiences in both the DA and DAO communities, Beth was thrilled to teach for the Davidson Institute as an instructor for STARS in 2020 and 2022. She looks forward to returning this summer to work with brilliant young scholars as a REACH instructor.

Megan Hightower

Megan Hightower’s undergraduate and graduate degrees in English literature are both from Radford University in Virginia. At Radford, she taught entry level English classes to college freshman as well as a few American literature courses. The freedom of teaching at university was a wonderful experience for her, but the student connections, the most important part, were minimal. After four years of teaching at Radford, she decided to branch out and tried teaching high school. Megan began teaching 11th grade English (more American literature) at Halifax County High School in Fall of 2021. She found teaching high school challenging yet rewarding. As a result, Megan took a chance and applied to a position in Reno, Nevada, a very long way from home, for the opportunity to teach English Composition and Analysis as well as Rhetoric and Literary Analysis to middle and high schoolers at The Davidson Academy. She plans to stay at the Davidson Academy for as long as she can since she has found quite a happy home.

Callie McCartney

Callie has been teaching math, physics, engineering, and computer science for 13 years.  She loves the STEM fields because combining theory, project design, and real world action is truly fun and meaningful.  She has a master’s in mechanical engineering from UNR with research in using technology to scale engineering education for the purpose of doing more hands-on learning in smaller groups.  Computer science has been her favorite courses to teach over the years as they are so creative, fun, and applicable to everyday life; there is always a fun project or discussion to be had or an interesting problem to solve.